It is sometimes difficult, and perhaps even wrong headed, to cling to normal critical standards when judging documentaries. The complex force of something real can be overpowering, even when the best that can be said is that the filmmaker doesn't impose himself between the viewer and the material, that he allows it to speak clearly for itself.
Monte Bramer's Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer's End is a case in point. A thoroughly conventional clips-and-interviews documentary; standard TV biography stuff, it is nevertheless a powerful record of a life devoted stubbornly, even heroically to self-expression. The power derives from the material rather than the moviemaking, but that doesn't mean the power isn't real, or significant.
An openly gay poet and novelist (The Long Shot), Monette won a National Book Award in 1992 for his memoir Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story. At that point he had already lost two lovers to AIDS and was terminally ill himself. His determination to keep writing every single day, shuffling to the computer clinging to his IV stand, must have required huge reserves of physical courage. Monette emerges as a role model not just for writers, and not just for gay writers, but for anyone inclined to take the freedom to speak and to create for granted. Monette in one scene displays an "I Am Salman Rushdie" pin conspicuously on his lapel, a clear indication that he understood, and embraced, the larger implications.
Becoming a Man was designed to be the book Monette had longed to read as a young gay man, but couldn't find, because it didn't yet exist; a plain-spoken account of shared experience that rang true and offered useful advice and reassurance. If the award-winning status of the book means anything (always an open question), it's that the work transcends its immediate purpose, that it describes one form of a common human occurrence, and makes its universality clear. As Monette says here, "We all have a closet we have to come out of if we are ever going to be free."
One of the movie's strongest subplots is an assessment of what it cost the writer to arrive at that mature outlook. At the start, according to his editor, Monette was not so much a man who wanted to write as a charismatic young go-getter "who wanted to be a writer;" less a matter of having something urgent to say than of playing a certain role in the world. In retrospect, it seems, the only thing missing was a personal experience harrowing enough to stir him to the core, to burn off the impurities.
Monette seems to have been transfigured, transmuted into an artist, by his experience of AIDS, his lovers' and then his own. His first work of non-fiction, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, was an unflinching yet affirmative and even romantic account of his life with his companion of 12 years, attorney Roger Horowitz, and of Roger's illness and death; a book often cited as the first about the plague to cross-over strongly to straight readers. For many, it gave the crisis a human face.
Will Borrowed Time survive as the Diary of Anne Frank of the AIDS scourge, as Monette himself incautiously suggests? It's an indication of the personal power of his story that we respond to Monette's most extreme positions (like the equivalence implied here between AIDS and the Holocaust) not with acceptance, perhaps, but certainly with understanding. They emerge as consistent extensions of a personality, as essential components of a full portrait.
A movie can honestly earn an emotional response in many ways, and distinguished film technique is only one of them. "I'm not dying of AIDS," Monette insists, "I'm dying of homophobia." In this film, and in the most literal possible sense, we can see where Paul Monette was coming from.
